The Captive Reader

Ages ago, I used to make an annual habit of rereading Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters. While long Victorian novels are associated more with long cold nights by the fire, for me it always made ideal reading for the long hot summer days, its slow pace forcing me to slow down and escape the heat.

It’s a tradition that had slipped away from me over the past few years – not consciously but somehow it never seemed to fit. I would still pick it up regularly, read a few hundred pages perhaps, and then, having enjoyed my visit with old friends, move on to something new.

This year there was no moving on. I read it at a leisurely pace last week (during another heatwave here), delighted to be reunited with Molly Gibson whose life is upended when, on the verge of womanhood, her long widowed father remarries and she gains not just a new mother but a new sister. I’ve written about my love for Wives and Daughters before and my reasons for loving it have not changed. Every character is wonderful and terribly real, full of both loveable and frustrating traits. The small society in which they move is perfectly drawn, with both affection and exasperation. And somehow for a book that is 700 pages long the story never lags. Indeed, it’s only frustration is that the end comes too soon, Mrs Gaskell having died just before she could bring her masterpiece to a skillful conclusion.

It reminded me of what I knew all along: there is no better choice for a summer read than this. It forced me to slow down and savour what I was reading, a hard task during this anxiety-ridden summer and all the more pleasurable because I’d been challenged to do it by other means. And now I can move onto another equally pleasurable task: a rewatch of the wonderful television adaptation, in which Michael Gambon is the most perfect personification of Squire Hamley that could ever be imagined.